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1st record/1st Show
Or, How I Accidentally Fell Into the Wonderful World of Music
I was four, I think, in school in NYC. One day a week a wonderful lady
named Charity Bailey would come into the classroom and "teach us music." Mostly
this consisted of teaching us rhythms: "Now, pound on your desks, children,
with your fists, like this. One, two, three, FOUR." It was great fun to
hear the fifteen or twenty of us pounding away as loudly as we could. She also
brought records to school (the first ones I ever heard), and would play them
for us on a wind-up Victrola and sing along.
And about once a month she brought real live people to school who played guitars
and banjos and sang what she told us were "folk songs." The fact that
these were mostly black musicians (as was Miss Charity herself), and that they
were also the first black people the four-year-old Italian child had ever seen,
just added to the mystery. Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Stu Jamison,
Rev. Gary Davis, Josh White, Cisco Houston, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Jester
Hairston, Leadbelly, and I don't know who all else were my first music teachers,
and I was too young to know who they were, and how amazingly lucky I was.
I grew up, hung around the Village a bit, worked briefly at the Gaslight, and
in 1962 moved to Los Angeles. I was sent by my friend Art Kunkin one afternoon
to the Ash Grove to pick up or deliver something to Ed Pearl, the club's owner.
To my complete amazement he asked me if I could stay for a couple of hours to
answer the phone and take reservations for thatnight's show. That was the eccentric
first day of working for Ed in the club's office, a job that would come to a
bitter end a decade later when the place burned down. I made many good friends
there, including my pal Todd Everett, well known to all viewers of Art's TV show;
we met when Todd was the music reviewer for the L.A. Times and used to come in
to the club.
During my years there I was re-introduced to music from my childhood. Two weeks
after I started working there, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee walked through
the front door. I recognized them immediately, and was overwhelmed at the way
my past connected to my present, and to my future. Ed, seeing me sitting at my
desk with tears running down my face for no reason decided I was crazy, and nothing
I ever did after that changed his opinion. Crazy or not, I was cheap labor; I
worked from 9 a.m. till 2 a.m. seven days a week. I got $25 a week the first
five years, and I would have done it for nothing: my rent (a tiny apartment with
no kitchen a block from the club) was only $65 a month. I had many fights with
Ed that left me in frustration and rage; I would have quit many more times than
I did had it not been for the music. I heard blues and folk music and Cajun bands
and bluegrass and gospel music and western swing, and made friends with the people
who came to play. Mance Lipscomb, Son House, Arlo Guthrie and many others crashed
on my couch, and played guitar in my living room till all hours. I was married
to a musician then, and we moved in an interesting folk and folk-rock scene.
My record collection was mostly folk music and blues albums given to me
by the musicians who played at the club, or demos of the local bands my
then-husband worked with.
The Ash Grove came to its untimely end in 1973. At a panel at the UCLA Folk Festival
in 1974 I met Frank Scott, who was selling folk music and blues records at a
booth, and I went to work in his record store, J&F Records, in Pasadena.
Surrounded by music again, I had to struggle hard to keep from taking inventory
home every night. Frank hosted a blues show on KPFK, the Pacifica station in
L.A., and I would go to the station with him to answer phones. Eventually he
moved away, taking the record store with him, and I took over the blues show,
in the casual way that public radio has always morphed. That led to hosting a
folk and bluegrass show on KCSN; since the stations had no libraries I brought
my own records. Somehow being on the radio made me an "expert," and
I started getting calls to write liner notes for blues albums, folk music albums,
and all sorts of roots music stuff. It didn't hurt a bit that I was a woman,
as there were quotas to be met. I was single-parenting two kids by then, and
welcomed the opportunity to work at home. But one fateful day I was sent a really
awful track listing to annotate, and in an uncharacteristic moment of outspokenness
I called my contact at the label and said, "You are JOKING. Who programmed
this compilation? It stinketh out loud!" And then I said the egotistic sentence
that would rule the rest of my life: "Hell, I could do better than THIS!"
Ahh, the arrogance. You can probably figure out where my big mouth got me. I've
produced and annotated somewhere around 300 reissues; won a few awards, mostly
pieces of Lucite which add to the artistic clutter of my apartment. When I produced
the Weavers box set in 1990 I was able to tell Pete Seeger that it was, indirectly,
all his fault. He still remembered those schoolroom afternoons with Charity Bailey!
I also wrote liner notes for a Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee album, although
unfortunately not until long after they had both passed on. I went to Josh White's
funeral and said a silent thank you, then gave obituaries and read eulogies at
more and more funerals after that, as the first generation of blues, folk and
bluegrass musicians began to leave us.
About fifteen years ago my close friend Manny Greenhill, casting about for someone
who knew folk music and blues, asked me to come to work temporarily at Folklore,
his roots music booking agency. I'm still there, though Manny too has gone
on now, and his son Mitch and grandson Matt steer the ship. We represent a lot
of my old friends from the folk music era, and I'm probably going to be there
for the duration. I continue to write liner notes and produce reissues, and every
now and then I emcee a fiddle contest or a folk or blues festival. I'm on a few
Advisory Boards of a few music organizations, but I try not to do too much committee
stuff; I always got an F on my report card for "Plays Well With Others."
Oh yeah, this was supposed to be about the first record I ever bought. Hmmm. I
have no earthly idea. Probably a Perry Como record, or something equally un-hip.
I do remember that when I first moved to L.A. in 1962 I used to hang around Wallich's
Music City at Sunset and Vine because they had a guitar repair shop (run by Milt
Owen) AND they had listening booths where you could listen to any album or 45.
I spent hours there, and although they sold LPs at full list price, which was
then $3.98, I left a lot of money there over the years. But I would have
bought my first record long before that, somewhere in the Village. It would be
pretty funny if it had been a Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry record.
Mary Katherine Aldin
www.aliveandpicking.com
Another Fein Mess/
AF Stone’s Monthly
September 2005
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WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION
Click Here
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Shop Around
I have homosexual tendencies. Characteristics. I like some Broadway shows, and
shopping. Not for dresses, and not going out with the guys or girls, but doing
the marketing and other stuff. I watch the prices like a hawk and swoop when
discounts come on vulnerable items. It’s my version of the stock market.
For old stuff I like only misnamed antique malls with stalls selling stuff of
the past half-century. What good is older stuff? Does anyone today thrill to “Welcome
President Roosevelt” posters? It’s too old. Shirley Temple stuff, unlike
Shirley Temple, is dead. Elvis stuff, too, has dwindling appeal.
So do antique malls. One here in south L.A. county has many stalls plastered
with signs offering big discounts. People aren’t leaving the house, they’re
shopping online. The antique malls are suffering.
At a mall in Chicago I got skunked despite my averred hawkishness. I bought a
1964 “Dubious Achievements” issue of Esquire1 for
seven bucks since some of the year’s embarassments, Bob Dylan and the Beatles,
were pictured on the cover. Took it home and what do you know - those pages were
torn out. This takes me back to my youth in dog-eat-dog Chicago when I bought
a shirt on Maxwell street, packaged neatly in plastic, for a bargain price. When
I got it home I found a huge rip up the back. To this day I check the back of
shirts, rarely as I buy them. (I’m shirted for life.)
Nostalgia isn’t what it once was. I inherited several bits of memorabilia
from the 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair. I saw some other stuff from that fair at a
Chi mall selling at reasonable prices, but got to wondering what or how many
people were lusting for Chicago Worlds Fair stuff. I checked ebay, whence I’ve
never interacted, for stuff under that heading and found my junk going for seven
and eight dollars. If anyone was buying.
Popular history is about now. Tom Brokaw made a big hit with his “great
generation” book bec it appealed to the people so-identified and to people
like me who admired the valor and unitedness of the war years. (My uncle Artie,
my namesake, died in the battle of Leyte in 1944.) It’s generational adjacency.
What if he’d written about the heroic men of World War One? “They were
born in the 1890s in a great Depression. They saw the coming of electricity,
telephones, automobiles, airplanes, jazz! They fought on the battlefields of
France and faced poison gas!” It would be no sale: they’re all dead2.
1 I also saw a late-1966 ish with summaries
of noteworthy cities: Brussells for commerce, this for that, and L.A. for “vulgarity.” It
cited news items that suited the premise: an ad for a swingers apartment, news
that someone was horrifically killed, and a long item about the Teenage Fair
from the L.A. Free Press. That one, which mocked teenagers “stuffed in bell-bottom
pants” ogling teen-marketed stuff filled the Esquirers with dudgeon but
I could hardly see what was vulgar. I mentioned this to a friend who’s studying
L.A.’s place in America in the 1960’s and he clued me: “Remember,
Esquire was a New York magazine.” I’d forgot.
2 “No Sale” is a great song by
Louis Jordan. “All Dead” a great one by Queen.
Teen Appall
I must dump some aging material I have stacked up. In a footnote above I cited
The L.A. Free Press’s slam of a teen fair. The Freep was the alternative
paper for college-age and -minded people so naturally disdained young-teen stuff.
This has been going on, then, at least since 1966. The writers were barely out
of their teens and screaming that they not be identified with the piffle so near
to them agewise.
It’s the same today in rock criticism, except the post-teens screaming “I’m
not a kid” are 30 to 70. It shows in reviews of teen stars. These shows
are calculated entertainment, and rock reviewers bristle at this exercise in
commerce. Instead of evaluating it for its effectiveness -- such shows are, after
all, a spectacle like the Ice Capades -- they schrey in sarcasm and unmasked
anger. Britney Spears got a lot of such ink.
NYT 10-6-02 “Schoolyard Superstar Aims for Second Act,
as an Adult.” Laura
M Holson and Alex Kucyznski: Laura and Alex assail her new couture look as “an
unseemly parody as she tries to become a grown-up recording artist.” The
movement she led, snickers Blender editor Craig Marks, “is very five minutes
ago.” And so on.
NYT 11-2-03 “Growing Up: Britney Did It Again.” Neil Strauss.
Herein the noted comportment lecturer Strauss laments her current wildness streak
(as covered by “the tabloids,” he writes, as if to differentiate him
from them) as “a narrow view of adulthood that defines maturity only in
terms of sex, alcohol and partying.” (Who besides Pruneface Strauss called
her partying “maturity”?) In his Jonathan Edwards hat, Strauss intones “the
foundations of adulthood run much deeper, having to do with coping with increased
responsibility while developing intellectually and emotionally.” It must
have been difficult writing this with that stick up his ass!
11-28-03 LA Times (Washington Post pickup). “It’s all the rage now:
Hating Britney Spears.” Laura Sessions Stepp. “So, pop tart
Britney Spears says she’s abandoning her teen fan base for older listeners.” (She
said THAT exactly?) “This will come as a great relief to the grown-ups who...
hate Britney Spears.” What kind of grown-ups sit around hating Britney Spears?
She quotes a mother of an 11-year-old daughter “Don’t get me started.” Snickers
are not just a candy bar.
3-4-04 LA Times “A Losing Battle of the buzz.” Robert Hilburn.
With the wacky theory that Janet Jackson’s televised titty-peak “overhadowed” Britney’s
whole career, Hilburn “senses” a “vague feeling of futility” about
Brit‘s new tour. “In the battle for the young pop crowd’s attention,
where musical quality is rarely the deciding factor, the prize often goes to
the performer who creates the biggest buzz.3” His
disdain for her show (that durn kid stuff!) and style is tangible so why should
we take what he writes seriously? “What could she possibly do in 90 minutes
to claim even a quarter of the attention that Janet Jackson stirred during one
second?” “It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for the 22-year-old
former Mouseketeer,” says the (then) 63-year-old former city-schools PR
man.
3-4-04 NYT “Suds, Sequins, and Even A Little Song From Spears.” Neil
Strauss. After describing “naughty” visuals from her show, he sniffs
that “for a woman who’s said she’s sick of being in the headlines,
it’s certainly described to grab more.” (He takes a performer’s
cry for quiet anonymity seriously!) “... she seems to have outdone even
her mentor, Madonna.” So then it’s a triumph, right? Madonna’s
antics were hailed in their heyday. “With her dance-driven Top 40 pop sounding
out of date” (you hear so little of that type music on the radio now ) “at
least she’s already prepared for tenure in the casinos.” And Britney
sobs, Why do you hate me, Mister Typewriter?
4-24-04 LATimes “If Britney’s book seemed flat, imagine the movie.”
Carina Chocano. “There’s nothing brave or new about “Brave
New Girl,” an original ABC family movie based on a novel by Britney and
Lynn (Britney’s mom!) Spears...” (You expected, maybe, a rave review?) “You
know the culture is on its last legs when expensively educated people decide
that Britney Spears’ literary oeuvre needs to be adapted by tv.”
You know your newspaper is in trouble when a tangle-head like Chocano
is extensively printed. TV executives are “expensively educated?” What reaching! What
drivel! It’s a fairy tale movie about a kid from the sticks who makes it
big in show biz. For that, Chocano spits.
In this den of whiners, Britney comes out the mature one.
3 -Remember, a “buzz” is flies
in your head
More Kid Stuff
This about newcomer Katy Rose, in a review by Jon Boy Pareles in the NYT
10-19-03: “In Avril Lavigne’s petulant footsteps comes another teen-rock
rebel.” After citing some lyrics he snears “Somewhere in California,
a high-school literary magazine has lost a star.” PU, you stink, you dumb
kid. And 7-27-04, Pareles cackles that Hillary Duff’s songs are about “having
fun, surviving disappointments and following her conscience.” As opposed
to good adult songs about suffering, suicide and betraying your conscience. I
HATE KIDS. DO NOT MISTAKE ME FOR ONE.
In the 6-6-05 NYT, The Kalefa Sanneh Black-Eyed Peas review lets you know
whose side he or she is on with the damning words “cheerful, clean-scrubbed,” “brisk,
lightweight,” “wholesome.” Only dismal, dirty, plodding, ponderous
disgusting rock gets respect at the NYTimes.
In the 8/21/05 LATimes Calendar, Eric Hanson drew, “for the Times,” a
3-panel cartoon with the hed “Paparazzi Problem, Britney? Forget the Pellet
Gun.” (Did Britney shoot a pellet gun at a photog? I guess we’re all
supposed to know.) The clumsy panels suggested wrapping herself in snakes, baring
her (implicitly disgusting pregnant) body, and finally “Unload your extra
copies of ‘Oops!...I Did It Again.” We all hate Britney like the unaccomplished
snobs at the L.A. Time, don’t we? What is this childish crap doing in a
supposedly “grownup” newspaper?
And on an allied note, Alessandra Stanley, in the 8/22/05 NY Times, opens
a piece with “It was impossible not to snicker a little at the notion of
Al Gore creating a hip, youth-oriented cable network.” Impossible for WHOM?
What rude arrogance! It is impossible to imagine how the apparently-teenaged
Stanley is allowed to write without oversight.
More Shopping News
Whenever I get back from out of town, I find stuff moved in the house. Chairs
come, go, but none have yet been attached yet to the ceiling. (My ideas are never
used.)
Recently I looked for the Sunbeam electric orange juicer I bought at Bargain
Circus in the 70s, and in its place was a shiny black thing with the word KRUPS
on it. “That old one was looking really bad” my wife explained. But
that old one, which was twice good because I bought it used-and-repaired, had
a heavy ceramic reamer and metal tray and strong motor. I tried the new one with
the plastic reamer and tray. It must have had a plastic motor too, because when
I pressed hard as necessary on the orange-half, the machine itself spun around.
And I ain’t Hercules.
“The old one is better” I declared, and hid it for future use.
In a remarkable coincidence, soon after that incident I met a woman who once
worked at KRUPS. In Chicago, my uncle, Herb, 82, took me to dinner with his new
gal friend Ilona. Ilona was from eastern Hungary near the Czech border. (“Budapest?
I think I was there one time.”) Ilona is in her late 70s. She went to work
at KRUPS in 1942 when the Germans invaded her village. She was a slave laborer,
making munitions. Then she went to Auschwitz. I never thought Chicago oldsters
were very hip, but she had a tattoo. On her forearm. With a number.
I’ve reinstated the Sunbeam juicer and hid the KRUPS in the trash.
-- Related News (Nobody Remembers Nuthin’ Dept):
The 8/23/05 L.A. Times report that Harrah’s was buying the old Imperial
Gardens casino on the Las Vegas Strip omitted that 20 years ago The I.G. got
in hot water when some employees objected to compulsorily attending the owner’s
annual Hitler’s Birthday celebration there.
The Weight
I ran into Chuck E. Weiss at the Mayfair Market on Franklin Aug 26th. We go back
to 1965 at the University of Colorado. Actually, he goes back, he was heading
for Denver the next day.
In the late 80s when we went to Raji’s nightclub every Wens night, to see
Billy Bremner4, we would
compare weight. We were pretty slim then. We used the dates of records as a code:
if I was up to 164 I’d say “the first year of the Beatles.” (1964.)
When he hit his all-time low weight, his clue was ironic: “The Fat Man.” (1[9]47.)
Time’s passed, and he sized me up realistically. Because we don’t know
any records of the past 20 years, he was tongue-tied but said with a wary eye “The
first Clinton administration?” No, I said, the impeachment.
4 Do you miss Rockpile? Billy’s new
album, “No Ifs, Ands Or Buts5” on
Warner Records/Sweden is an amazing resuscitation of that sound.
5 Spelled with variety on the spine, front,
cover, back cover, disk.
I’m So Out Of Date
A few years ago at a camera store I asked for the Pentax camera they’d advertised,
saying “I’d like to see that Honeywell in the ad.” The guy paused
for a split-second but I could see his disbelief. Pentax, made by Asahi, was
marketed under the Honeywell name in the 1950s and 1960s to deemphasize its Japanese
origins.
I was recently with some elder gentlemen at breakfast, and one said “Did
you see the game last night?” Another said he had, and I said “the
Dodgers game?,” as I had recently taken up baseball-watching6.
Like a rapper of 17 the guy looked at me uncomprehendingly and said “No,
basketball.” How could I know that “the game” was now basketball?
As ever, I’m on the trash-heap of culture.
6 It has taken me 30 years to disavow my
allegiance to the Chicago Cubs. I realized that after more than half a life here
I am an Angeleno.
All’s Not Fair
Albert Garcia, the guy who a couple years ago turned on the stove and shut the
doors but killed only his four children, not himself as intended, was recently
sentenced to life. So where was the big press coverage?
At that same time a woman in Texas manually drowned her four children and the
press was up in arms -- over her husband. He’d done nothing wrong, but columnists
and feminists excoriated him for not seeing the signs that she was about to commit
murder, for not sending her to a mental hospital as soon as her fourth child
was born, for fathering the children, for making her have children, for marrying
her, etc. A woman has committed a hideous crime: cherchez l’homme!
Garcia NAMED his wife as the culprit in his hideous murder/failed suicide --
yet his charge against her was never examined. Maybe she mistreated the kids,
spent his money on other men, drank til she stank, brought her boyfriends home
to their bed, hit him with a bottle, stabbed him, lost all their money in Las
Vegas, failed to see the signs of his mental deterioration, failed to use birth
control, ignored his pleas to stop torturing him. Sky’s the limit, based
on the Texas gal’s case.
But newspapers don’t want to know. Can’t have a female villain. Women
are all warm and wonderful and loving. As all women know.
Bend Over 7
Called Verizon cell-phone 411 for the Avis car rental place in Burbank8.
“I can only give you the 800 number” the Verizon operator said.
“No, I want the Burbank rental office. They have a phone number.”
“Well, we don’t have it.”
“So don’t charge me for the service.”
“Sir, some numbers we don’t have, some numbers the phone company doesn’t
have.”
I don’t know what numbers the phone company doesn’t have, other than
unlisted numbers.”
“Still, we don’t have that number.”
“So take it off my bill.”
“I can’t do that.”
“How do I access the phone company’s information?”
“You can’t on your cell phone.”
“So you have a limited service, that’s all?”
“Yes sir, and you are charged when you use it.”
And there’s is an improvement over Sprint. Five years ago I spend ten minutes,
for sport, with an info operator who could not find a listing for the New York
Times. Nor could her supervisor.
7 A radio ad recently gave the name “Dr.
Benjamin Dover” as its sponsor. This could only refer to the old joke-name
couple Ilene and Ben Dover.
8 I’ve returned to Avis after
trying Enterprise for a while: the latter company is just too shifty. I was calling
the Avis office bec I’d forgotten my rental agreement at home: might need
it if stopped by police, etc. When I finally reached them -- a friend found me
the phone # on the internet -- they said they would cheerily fax a copy to that
evening’s hotel in Redding. On a Saturday.
Phil’s Spectre
Driving into Bend I listened to the entire Phil’s Spectre, an Ace/UK
CD featuring 24 Phil Spector soundalikes, and it really drove the point home
that only Phil has the key to that sound. Track after track was flawed, the only
near-perfect one the Jack Nitzsche-produced Righteous Brothers soundalike “I
Can’t Make It Alone” by P.J. Proby.
It reminded me of the bleak period of 1966 to 1976 when I craved new Spector
product when there was none. (There was none in 1976 either, but a whole bunch
of unrleased stuff came out in England.) Rock record-collecting was just developing,
and information and pertinent records were equally hard to track down. Still
I came across a few nourishing ones like “When The Boy’s Happy (The
Girl’s Happy Too)” by the Four Pennies (the Chiffons) and “My
One And Only Jimmy Boy” by the Girlfriends (prod by David Gates, a sometimes
Spector session man).
And also while drivin’ I played the 30-track “Golden Age Of American
Rock & Roll” CD, also from Ace/UK, for my daughter who sometimes likes
old stuff. Only half-listening, I began to suspect this was a concept album because
of these tunes: Sally Go Round The Roses, Pretty Little Angel Eyes, I Love How
You Love Me, The Big Hurt, A Thousand Stars, Rockin’ Robin, Earth Angel,
Bongo Rock, Stranded in the Jungle, Angel Baby, Cindy’s Birthday, Let’s
Dance, Love You So, Cherry Pie, Image Of A Girl, Gee Whiz, Eddie My Love.
I was wrong, but the “concept” was truly there, if only on these 17
cuts:
All were Los Angeles records.
Am I The Only Person Who
-- thinks “Wedding Crashers” was disgusting?
-- has never seen a young woman at the wheel of a car not holding a cell phone
at her ear?
Kudos to Paul Brownfield Of The L.A. Times
who wrote that Courtney Love is “the Foster Brooks of her generation.”
- 57 -
Letters
Regarding the revolutionary iPod:
I've been reading this story a little too often lately:
Wow! This thing plays my favorite songs! Golly, that
phenomenon is unprecedented! This is significant sociological
event! It expresses my soul, dude!
Or maybe it doesn't signify anything new at all... other than an improvement
on the cassette.
NEAL MCCABE
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After reading this month about the blundering treatment of
Sam Cooke on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Timeline, I clicked immediately onto
the Hall's site and began my own hunt for inanity. I didn't have to venture far.
The Timeline's insight into the genius of Louis Armstrong is expressed in the
only two entries on his particular stretch of Timeline: 1) "August 4, 1901. Louis Armstrong is born." 2) "July
6, 1971. Louis Armstrong died in New York, NY." In between? Nothing. I supposed
we can infer that a career of some sort transpired between those two points in
time, but the shape and definition of it is left to our imagination.
And, with
that, my new on-line game was born: Track the Crap. It's easy to play: just
jump onto the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Timeline and sniff around for
wrong-headedness, sloppiness of thought or research or sheer stupidity.
In fact, it's almost too easy to play. Try this: the Timeline claims
to represent "rock and roll
and POPULAR MUSIC history..." (emphasis added), and stretches back to
the 1920s.
However, it is shackled by obedience to one of the verities of rock
criticism -- that the sourcepoints of rock and roll are country, rhythm
and blues, gospel and blues, and no other genres need apply. Thus, the
Timeline's foundation points in the 1920s and 1930s are those four. And
here's why they can find no place for Louis Armstrong's staggering achievements:
where the hell is jazz? Or, for that matter, jazz's poppish little brother,
swing? Every hot guitar break of the rock and roll era owes a debt to
the jazz soloists of the 1920s -- like Armstrong -- who INVENTED the
improvisational solo. Couldn't that point be made?
And, while the revolutionary
impact of that first generation of Dixieland -- when the term actually
meant something -- would eventually be felt in all of pop music, the
crucial intermediate period of further development belonged to the equally
ignored genre of the big bands. Hey, anyone who has ever heard Illinois
Jacquet's spectacular sax solo in Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home" (1946)
knows he is hearing the blueprint for a decade of fabulous honking by
rhythm and blues and jump band saxmen. In fact, where did so many of
the great r and b combo leaders and musicians of the late 1940s come
from -- the big bands, and especially the extraordinary BLACK big bands
of the time.
However, because the Hall of Fame is locked into
the rock crit litany of country/rhythm and blues/gospel/blues as the SOLE sourcepoint,
it has no room for any of this. Thus, Billie Holliday and Nat King Cole are
shoe-horned into the category of Rhythm and Blues and poor Satchmo winds
up alongside Elmore James in Blues. By the way, this is just the first
of a series of blunders I encountered on the Timeline.
Your attempt to
find a reference to "Louie
Louie" led me to some searches of my own. Although I suspected it was
a lost cause, I typed in the name of my beloved Sonics. No dice. But then I
went farther. The entire garage rock world is absent. No Standells, no ? and
the Mysterians, no Wailers, no Shadows of Knight, no sign at all of those zillions
of kids in the mid-1960s playing like the Kinks playing like Howling Wolf.
A category which
surely merited mention as much as Girl Groups and the Brill Building -- two
faves of mine, as you know -- is nonexistent. Then again, the Timeline
scholars find the Big Bang of Punk in Patti Smith's first album, which
sets my teeth to grinding. They also insist that the Light Crust Doughboys
was Bob Wills' band, a fact that would have shocked old W. Lee O'Daniel,
for whom Bob grudgingly worked, and Milton Brown, who shared star billing
with Bob in the LCD and went on, in the view of many of us, to share
dominion over the nascent Western Swing world with Wills.
Well, I'm raving,
so I'll cease. But, once again, your site has delivered not only amusement
but enlightenment. I intend to play Track the Crap whenever I bring myself
to stomach the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Timeline. I am confident
of unending opportunity. And, once again -- a diverting and terrific
month's work by you. Later...
Bob Nafius
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